Late at night you would have walked out of a bar on a country road under a cold clear night sky broken by the barest streaks of clouds and noticed how incredibly bright it was, so much brighter than other nights you’d been outside under winter stars. Turning around in every direction, you’d have seen mountains completely surrounding your field of vision, mountains covered in fresh snow glowing under the full moon, reflecting so much light that the fenceposts in a field half a mile away were visible. And then realized you haven’t ever thought of yourself as a person who cried at beautiful things, but every time you saw these mountains, the part of you made of raw animal feelings leapt into your throat and made you cry, sometimes smiling with joy at approaching them, sometimes gasping and choking with grief at the thought of not coming back to them again.
Audacia Ray sent me a review copy of the Red Umbrella Project’s _Cooking In Heels_, a memoir cookbook Ceyenne Doroshow was inspired to write while serving prison time for a prostitution conviction. I’d really like a trans sex worker to review it rather than just have me as a cis sex worker come at it from my limited perspective. Plus, I don’t know anything about cooking. So, does anyone who fits this description want first dibs? I’ll send you the e-book.
Michael Gira going to the MoMA and staring at the same Francis Bacon painting for four hours
Michael Gira eating at Katz’s and ordering a corned unicorn
Michael Gira asking Ed Koch’s skull how it’s doing
Michael Gira at Barneys inquiring where the cowboy hats woven from night are
Michael Gira…
Michael Gira on line at Shake Shack for an hour, only orders a Pepsi
Michael Gira at Book of Mormon laughing til tears run out of his eye
Michael Gira at FAO Schwartz jumping on a giant toy piano like Tom Hanks in Big
Michael Gira outside the Today show holding up the “Shart” sign
Michael Gira at Empire Mayonnaise buying a jar of taint flavor
Michael Gira at Stumptown orders a pour over, throws out the coffee and rubs the warm grounds into his face.
Michael Gira at a Nets game standing up when the T-shirt cannon is fired, hoping for a souvenir.
This is for the twenty or so people who take great joy in Chris Jones’s sporadic shit-losing. If that sentence means nothing to you, I beg you to move along.
Chris Jones is a magazine writer. He’s a successful magazine writer, which requires focus, ambition, hustle, and not a little self-promotion in these times of shrinking pagecounts and shuttered doors. He is also a good writer. He won a National Magazine Award for this story. He wrote that intense profile of Roger Ebert and the crazy story about the guy who killed himself after letting loose his collection of exotic animals in Ohio. Good stories, successful guy.
Horrible on Twitter. Awful with blogging. Whiny, confrontational, bullying. Blocks anyone who disagrees with him. Posts pictures of his calves (boy, does he talk a lot about calves). Stormed off of the internet, deleting his blog when he couldn’t handle the responses to his loud wailing disappointment when his Ebert profile wasn’t nominated for an Ellie. Issues challenges to other writers to fight him and then doesn’t follow through with any of the multiple respondents. Does not do well with the personal essay form, either.
Bully might seem a little strong, but the difference between an asshole and a bully is that the asshole can usually take what he dishes out, and probably doesn’t block everyone who argues with him on Twitter. Nor does he write blog posts insulting young new writers. It is baffling to watch this extreme pettiness, and writers are a group to whom petty insults and hurt feelings count as exercise. An ASME award-winning writer arguing about bullshit on Twitter and insulting writers at The Classical is like seeing Kelly Clarkson show up at your local karaoke night and having her mock all of the other singers while spilling drinks and being rude to the bartender (not to compare the people with whom he spars to karaoke singers. To the contrary; most are very good).
It’s just fucking bizarre. Why are you showing your ass online with that temper, Mr. Jones?
Last night he decided to chime in on the Manti Te’o story by talking about how sometimes you just take that enormous leap to trust that strangers on the internet are who they say they are. As an example he presented, in ten tweets, a dinner he had with a Twitter follower. He could have been hoodwinked just like Manti! Except, no. The two things are nothing alike. It was just a way to say “I met with a fan. How cool of me was it to do that?” Judge for yourself (forgive my sloppy screenshots, but I suspect the Twitter account will be deleted someday as well, so will forgo embedding).
It was a little slow at work tonight so I did this. I think it is more realistic.
I have too much time on my hands sometimes. But seriously. Who among us at this point has not met a stranger from the internet? How hugely different is that from being strung along by a sockpuppet? Enormously. “Trust is not a sin.” GTFO.
“…what is uncommon is the aura of loneliness that surrounds the time wasters. They are like the Groke in Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books: the pure intensity of their loneliness could kill flowers.”
Loving this evisceration of the lowest life form in the strip club, the non-spending regular.
Gorgeous funeral clothes:
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So Yahoo! News has informed me they cannot publish the inaugural poem for Obama they commissioned from me (Paul Muldoon, Kevin Young, Brenda Shaughnessy, & James Franco also contributed poems), because it contains the word “queef.” I would drone (ha!) on about the complete idiocy of a society in…
So silly that Michael Robbins’ poem was censored because of “queef,” which I say is a fucking sexist thing to do. Or a pussy (HA) excuse.
